CULTURAL ALERTS.

1) Nic Dafis of Morfablog alerted me to the BBC radio drama based on David Jones’s In Parenthesis (which I discussed here, here, and here); it’s an hour and a half long, and you can listen to it by following the link on this page. It’s only online for a week from last Sunday, so I guess through this coming weekend; sorry about the delay, but at least it’s still there. It’s very well done, with lovely Welsh accents and restrained use of WWI sound effects; it was worth it for me just to learn that reveille is pronounced ruh-VALLEY Over There. (I followed along in my copy of the book, and noted some odd changes; “night woods” for “night weeds” is presumably just a misreading, but why did they change the song “Casey Jones” to “Tipperary” and “bull-shit” to “muck”??)
2) That great NYC institution Film Forum is currently showing my favorite movie of all time, Jean Renoir’s The Rules of the Game, and tomorrow will begin a two-week run of perhaps my favorite Godard movie, Two or Three Things I Know About Her, about which I wrote here. (The title in French is 2 ou 3 choses que je sais d’elle, which in idiomatic translation should be ‘one or two things I know about her,’ but the clunky literal version has become firmly embedded.) It’s a rare chance to see these great movies (especially the Godard, for which I thought there were no longer any screenable prints); don’t miss ’em if you can.

Comments

Two or three things… along with La Chinoise are the only Godard movies I really like (both in my top 20).
As for the title of the first, I assume (politely assuming full competence of the translator(s)) they didn’t want to use the title “One or two…” and then have the audience see “2 ou 3…”.
Maybe “A few things..” “A couple of things…”
As for the second, it seems that like some opera titles (La Traviata, Cosi Fan Tutte) they never even try to translate it into English. The Chinese Girl sounds wrong, the Chinawoman even worse. Any suggestions?
My preference might be to change it altogether to something like Chinese summer or Chinese vacation.
Or, considering the movie of a few years ago, The Chinese apartment.

It’s not clear how to translate Così fan tutte anyway, since a lot of the meaning is concentrated in the feminine plural ending, and the fact that in such constructions the masculine is used unless all the referents are feminine. “That’s what all women do” is overly explicit, not to say lurid.

Here in Canada a music student I had in a linguistics class told me that the opera is known (to her and her peers at any rate) in English as “Women are like that”, which likewise preserves the original rhythm without sounding more misogynistic than the original. In French the title is commonly translated as “Toutes pareilles”, which to me sounds much more misogynistic than the original.

Y, Hat: I don’t think you’d think so if you didn’t already know the context. In “The Notorious Miss Anstruther”, an 1891 story by E.W. Hornung (the inventor of Raffles the thief and Conan Doyle’s brother-in-law), “That’s what they all do” is about the men who constantly propose to the heroine and their habit of writing “idiotic farewell letters”.

is never translated into German, BTW – most likely because German doesn’t distinguish genders in the plural. Another factor, though, may be the idea that if Mozart had wanted it in German, he’d have written it in German, as he did with Die Zauberflöte…

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